433 research outputs found
Assessing the potential for reopening a building stone quarry : Newbigging Sandstone Quarry, Fife
Newbigging Sandstone Quarry in Fife is one of a number of former quarries in the Burntisland-
Aberdour district which exploited the pale-coloured Grange Sandstone from Lower
Carboniferous rocks. The quarry supplied building stone from the late 19th century, working
intermittently from 1914 until closure in 1937, and again when reopened in the 1970s to the
1990s. The stone was primarily used locally and to supply the nearby markets in the Scottish
Central Belt.
Historical evidence indicates that prior to sandstone extraction, the area was dominated by largescale
quarrying and mining of limestone, and substantial sandstone quarrying is likely to have
begun after the arrival of the main railway line in 1890. It is probable that removal of the
sandstone was directly associated with limestone exploitation, and that the quarried sandstone
was effectively a by-product of limestone production. Sandstone extraction was probably viable
due to the existing limestone quarry infrastructure (workforce, equipment, transportation) and the
high demand for building stone in Central Scotland in the late 19th century.
The geology within Newbigging Sandstone Quarry is dominated by thick-bedded uniform
sandstone with a wide joint spacing, well-suited for obtaining large blocks. However, a
mudstone (shale) band is likely to be present within a few metres of the principal (north) face of
the quarry, around which the sandstone bed thickness and quality is likely to decrease. The
mudstone bed forms a plane sloping at a shallow angle to the north, so that expansion of the
quarry in this direction is likely to encounter a considerable volume of poor quality stone.
Additionally, an east-west trending fault is present approximately 100 metres north of the quarry
face, which is also likely to be associated with poor quality (fractured) stone
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Investigating postharvest chilling injury in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) fruit using magnetic resonance imaging and 5-azacytidine, a hypomethylation agent
Tomato, like most species from tropical and subtropical regions, exhibits postharvest chilling injury (PCI) when stored at low temperatures. Because of its economic importance and the functional genomics tools available, we used tomato to investigate aspects of fruit PCI development. We asked two questions: First, are there spatial-temporal differences in the development of PCI that can be detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)? Here, the aim was to use a non-invasive method to study PCI progression in vivo. At mature green and breaker, the pericarp, locular tissue and columella produced distinct D-values while in contrast, there was no such differentiation in riper fruit. Although the pericarp is where most PCI symptoms are visible, this tissue showed less dynamism upon cold exposure, compared to the inner tissues as detected by MRI. This suggests the occurrence of distinct, independently modulated mechanisms contributing to the development of PCI-symptomatology. Collectively our data showed that the MRI could detect fruit ripening, its attenuation by cold, and fruit tissue-specific responses to chilling stress. The second question we asked was if epigenetic modification of the tomato genome or transcriptome influences PCI response. We examined PCI severity in fruit injected with a demethylating agent, 5- azacytidine (AZA). Two tomato genotypes exposed to varying severities of cold-stress were studied. Results suggested that AZA was able to moderate PCI in 'Micro-Tom' after 3 weeks at 2.5°C, while different patterns were observed in 'Sun Cherry' across various cold treatments. The effects of AZA on PCI were complex, multilayered and highly context-dependent
Gestational hypothyroxinemia affects its offspring with a reduced suppressive capacity impairing the outcome of the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis
Indexación: Scopus.Hypothyroxinemia (Hpx) is a thyroid hormone deficiency (THD) condition highly frequent during pregnancy, which although asymptomatic for the mother, it can impair the cognitive function of the offspring. Previous studies have shown that maternal hypothyroidism increases the severity of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), an autoimmune disease model for multiple sclerosis (MS). Here, we analyzed the immune response after EAE induction in the adult offspring gestated in Hpx. Mice gestated in Hpx showed an early appearance of EAE symptoms and the increase of all parameters of the disease such as: the pathological score, spinal cord demyelination, and immune cell infiltration in comparison to the adult offspring gestated in euthyroidism. Isolated CD4+CD25+ T cells from spleen of the offspring gestated in Hpx that suffer EAE showed reduced capacity to suppress proliferation of effector T cells (TEff) after being stimulated with anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibodies. Moreover, adoptive transfer experiments of CD4+CD25+ T cells from the offspring gestated in Hpx suffering EAE to mice that were induced with EAE showed that the receptor mice suffer more intense EAE pathological score. Even though, no significant differences were detected in the frequency of Treg cells and IL-10 content in the blood, spleen, and brain between mice gestated in Hpx or euthyroidism, T cells CD4+CD25+ from spleen have reduced capacity to differentiate in vitro to Treg and to produce IL-10. Thus, our data support the notion that maternal Hpx can imprint the immune response of the offspring suffering EAE probably due to a reduced capacity to trigger suppression. Such "imprints" on the immune system could contribute to explaining as to why adult offspring gestated in Hpx suffer earlier and more intense EAE. © 2018 Haensgen, Albornoz, Opazo, Bugueño, Jara Fernández, Binzberger, Rivero-Castillo, Venegas Salas, Simon, Cabello-Verrugio, Elorza, Kalergis, Bueno and Riedel.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2018.01257/ful
Feature extraction based on bio-inspired model for robust emotion recognition
Emotional state identification is an important issue to achieve more natural speech interactive systems. Ideally, these systems should also be able to work in real environments in which generally exist some kind of noise. Several bio-inspired representations have been applied to artificial systems for speech processing under noise conditions. In this work, an auditory signal representation is used to obtain a novel bio-inspired set of features for emotional speech signals. These characteristics, together with other spectral and prosodic features, are used for emotion recognition under noise conditions. Neural models were trained as classifiers and results were compared to the well-known mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. Results show that using the proposed representations, it is possible to significantly improve the robustness of an emotion recognition system. The results were also validated in a speaker independent scheme and with two emotional speech corpora.Fil: Albornoz, Enrique Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de IngenierÃa y Ciencias HÃdricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Milone, Diego Humberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de IngenierÃa y Ciencias HÃdricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Rufiner, Hugo Leonardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas. Centro CientÃfico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de IngenierÃa y Ciencias HÃdricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentin
Chronic relapsing neutrophilic meningitis as the sole manifestation of nocardiosis in a patient with mixed connective tissue disease.
We describe a rare case of a patient with mixed connective tissue disease maintained on chronic oral corticosteroids, who was hospitalized on five occasions over five consecutive months due to persistent relapsing neutrophilic meningitis caused by Nocardia asteroides. Immunosuppression due to the chronic use of corticosteroids was identified as the underlying mechanism of susceptibility. Our report highlights the challenges associated with systemic Nocardiosis, particularly in the immunocompromised host
Primordial Nucleosynthesis
Primordial nucleosynthesis, or Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), is one of the
three evidences for the Big-Bang model, together with the expansion of the
Universe and the Cosmic Microwave Background. There is a good global agreement
over a range of nine orders of magnitude between abundances of 4He, D, 3He and
7Li deduced from observations, and calculated in primordial nucleosynthesis.
This comparison was used to determine the baryonic density of the Universe. For
this purpose, it is now superseded by the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB) radiation anisotropies. However, there remain, a yet
unexplained, discrepancy of a factor 3-5, between the calculated and observed
lithium primordial abundances, that has not been reduced, neither by recent
nuclear physics experiments, nor by new observations. We review here the
nuclear physics aspects of BBN for the production of 4He, D, 3He and 7Li, but
also 6Li, 9Be, 11B and up to CNO isotopes. These are, for instance, important
for the initial composition of the matter at the origin of the first stars.
Big-Bang nucleosynthesis, that has been used, to first constrain the baryonic
density, and the number of neutrino families, remains, a valuable tool to probe
the physics of the early Universe, like variation of "constants" or alternative
theories of gravity.Comment: Invited Plenary Talk given at the 11th International Conference on
Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (NN2012), San Antonio, Texas, USA, May 27-June 1,
2012. To appear in the NN2012 Proceedings in Journal of Physics: Conference
Series (JPCS
Light neutralino dark matter in the MSSM and its implication for LHC searches for staus
It was shown in a previous study that a lightest neutralino with mass below
30 GeV was severely constrained in the minimal supersymmetric standard model
(MSSM), unless it annihilates via a light stau and thus yields the observed
dark matter abundance. In such a scenario, while the stau is the
next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle (NLSP), the charginos and the other
neutralinos as well as sleptons of the first two families are also likely to be
not too far above the mass bounds laid down by the Large Electron Positron
(LEP) collider. As the branching ratios of decays of the charginos and the
next-to-lightest neutralino into staus are rather large, one expects
significant rates of tau-rich final states in such a case. With this in view,
we investigate the same-sign ditau and tri-tau signals of this scenario at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for two MSSM benchmark points corresponding to
light neutralino dark matter. The associated signal rates for these channels
are computed, for the centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. We find that both
channels lead to appreciable rates if the squarks and the gluino are not too
far above a TeV, thus allowing to probe scenarios with light neutralinos in the
14 TeV LHC run with 10-100 fb^{-1}.Comment: 19p, 4 Fig
SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey data release 12 : galaxy target selection and large-scale structure catalogues
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III project, has provided the largest survey of galaxy redshifts available to date, in terms of both the number of galaxy redshifts measured by a single survey, and the effective cosmological volume covered. Key to analysing the clustering of these data to provide cosmological measurements is understanding the detailed properties of this sample. Potential issues include variations in the target catalogue caused by changes either in the targeting algorithm or properties of the data used, the pattern of spectroscopic observations, the spatial distribution of targets for which redshifts were not obtained, and variations in the target sky density due to observational systematics. We document here the target selection algorithms used to create the galaxy samples that comprise BOSS. We also present the algorithms used to create large-scale structure catalogues for the final Data Release (DR12) samples and the associated random catalogues that quantify the survey mask. The algorithms are an evolution of those used by the BOSS team to construct catalogues from earlier data, and have been designed to accurately quantify the galaxy sample. The code used, designated mksample, is released with this paper.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Loss of TET2 in human hematopoietic stem cells alters the development and function of neutrophils
Somatic mutations commonly occur in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Some mutant clones outgrow through clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and produce mutated immune progenies shaping host immunity. Individuals with CH are asymptomatic but have an increased risk of developing leukemia, cardiovascular and pulmonary inflammatory diseases, and severe infections. Using genetic engineering of human HSCs (hHSCs) and transplantation in immunodeficient mice, we describe how a commonly mutated gene in CH, TET2, affects human neutrophil development and function. TET2 loss in hHSCs produce a distinct neutrophil heterogeneity in bone marrow and peripheral tissues by increasing the repopulating capacity of neutrophil progenitors and giving rise to low-granule neutrophils. Human neutrophils that inherited TET2 mutations mount exacerbated inflammatory responses and have more condensed chromatin, which correlates with compact neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) production. We expose here physiological abnormalities that may inform future strategies to detect TET2-CH and prevent NET-mediated pathologies associated with CH
The Higgs sector of the phenomenological MSSM in the light of the Higgs boson discovery
The long awaited discovery of a new light scalar at the LHC opens up a new
era of studies of the Higgs sector in the SM and its extensions. In this paper
we discuss the consequences of the observation of a light Higgs boson with the
mass and rates reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations on the parameter
space of the phenomenological MSSM, including also the so far unsuccessful LHC
searches for the heavier Higgs bosons and supersymmetric particle partners in
missing transverse momentum as well as the constraints from B physics and dark
matter. We explore the various regimes of the MSSM Higgs sector depending on
the parameters MA and tan beta and show that only two of them are still allowed
by all present experimental constraints: the decoupling regime where there is
only one light and standard--like Higgs boson and the supersymmetric regime in
which there are light supersymmetric particle partners affecting the decay
properties of the Higgs boson, in particular its di-photon and invisible
decays.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures v2 - Discussion of the impact of LHC data
extended, scan statistics increased, a few figures added and typos correcte
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